Television Archiving

Keeping up with the BBC: Archives Pour Tous

• May 25th, 2006

The INA is setting a new standard for making television archives publicly accessible.

From the IHT:

One of the world’s leaders in digital audio and video has opened up its vault to the public, putting thousands of hours of radio and television recordings on the Internet for free.

Historic footage of Charles de Gaulle, Marc Chagall, Edith Piaf and Bob Marley, for instance, are available in small excerpts at www.ina.fr in a variety of formats, for both high-speed and low-speed Internet connections…

About 80 percent of the collection is free. For copyrighted material, INA charges €1 to €3, or $1.29 to $3.86, for the purchase of a 48-hour viewing window or €1 to €12 for full downloads.

The IHT notes that the site is receiving about five million visits a day, and the INA is adding about 5,000 hours of footage per year to the public collection.

Technorati Tags: Television Archives

Mr Rogers as Mr Smith

• May 25th, 2006

This clip of Fred Rogers testifying before the Senate on May 1, 1969 about educational television has a dramatic and satisfying denouement — it’s worth watching to the end.

Reposting: Dirty Tricks for Net Neutrality

• May 17th, 2006

It’s good to see this kind of deceptive PR called out.

Dirty Tricks for Net Neutrality:

Sascha Meinrath says
HandsofftheInternet.com is yet another prime example of astroturf in action.

I can only suspect that telecom incumbents pay some sort of professional PR group to create websites like this specifically to misinform and mislead the public. So I decided to start an investigation to figure out who HandsOff actually was.

A look at the "Membership Organizations" section — and low and behold, membership organizations included: AT&T, Bell South, Cingular Communications, The National Association of Manufacturer and a host of industry front groups

Now, this is rather enlightening, and I probably could have stopped there. But what happens if you delve deeper?…

The Portland Oregonian editorialized (anonomously) that Net Neutrality is a bad thing:

Congress can’t always tell what’s best for the Internet, especially in anticipating problems that haven’t yet occurred.

Net neutrality — the idea that everybody should be equal in cyberspace — has gained momentum as a populist movement but seems no closer to becoming law. A House committee recently rejected a Democrat-led effort to legislate the principle, and a current Republican-sponsored draft telecommunications bill mostly avoids the subject…

Rich Bader who runs EasyStreet Online Services, the largest independent ISP in Portland, has complete coverage of the Net Neutrality issue. Bader is pro-netneutrality. But he doesn’t hit you over the head with his side of the story.

David Isenberg is the real deal. He’s put together the most definitive presentation about the Net Neutrality issue I’ve seen. It’s here with audio narration.
For those of you looking for the “dumbed down” version of the issue, here’s a video, while not entirely accurate in my view, introduces the subject to lay people.

Anonomous editorials are a vestige of the 19th century. They should stimulate people to think and consider the issue. Not pitch a company line.

Advance/Newhouse Communications — which owns the Oregonian — is linked in a joint mobile partnership with Sprint Nextel. The newspaper never mentioned that fact.

Who would you be more inclinded to believe?

Via Unmediated.

NHK to put entire archive online?

• May 10th, 2006

From The Daily Yomiuri:

The entire NHK archive of more than 550,000 television programs should be made available on the Internet, an advisory panel for Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Heizo Takenaka agreed last week, prior to a final report to be announced later this month.

To achieve this goal, the ministry should lift the ceiling currently imposed on NHK, limiting income from Internet distribution to 1 billion yen a year, the panel said.

The panel also agreed the Broadcast Law should be revised to permit NHK to charge a viewing fee for the programs in addition to the standing viewing fee, sources close to the panel said.

Of the 550,000-plus programs owned by NHK, only about 5,700 are currently available on the Internet or to visitors to the NHK Archives in Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture, because of the regulation.

More at http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/business/20060507TDY02007.htm